


exercises in uncertainty

by twistedsky



Series: ramen24 [12]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Multi, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-09-07
Packaged: 2018-04-16 12:54:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4626066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedsky/pseuds/twistedsky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maggie's stuck in a time loop. Every day, her friends die, and the day resets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	exercises in uncertainty

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Violence, death(some of which is straight-up murder).
> 
> I'm really unhappy with this fic. For some reason it didn't want to cooperate, but it's part of a fic project(the very last part!), and I didn't have it in me to fail.
> 
> Slightly mentioned Rick/Michonne and Daryl/Aaron/Eric.

Today is a perfect day—or, at least, it starts off that way.

They’ve all settled down in the past few months, and they haven’t lost a person to the walkers in a month, and Maggie was beginning to think that was impossible.

Rick and Deanna are careful when they send people out for supplies, or to patrol the perimeter. They’re careful, but aggressive, and the balance seems to be working.

Maggie is just grateful to be able to breathe. It’s a lot like the prison, but it feels safer, and far less unnatural.

They all live in houses, reconfiguring groups and building new families—Daryl seems to have taken up permanent residence with Aaron and his boyfriend, Rick and Michonne are raising baby Judith and doing their best with Carl, and everywhere she looks, she sees the people she cares about most finally find happiness. It's nice.

And then, there’s her own little family—an imperfect family, missing the many people they’ve lost since the apocalypse began, but still beautiful and _right._

There have been a million times since this all started when Maggie’s just wondered how her life ended up this way, because she’d never have imagined that it would at any point along the way. Not at the farm, not the prison, and certainly not while they were on the road.

She’s not foolish to think that this happiness can last, but she’s tired, and just beginning to feel rested again.

Sometimes she wakes up in the arms of Tara and Glenn, still terrified that they’ll be attacked at any moment, but that happens less these days.

She still always has a weapon on her, and she’s on high alert more often than she’s not, but sometimes she allows herself to feel safe.

This, it turns out, is her undoing.

In fact, it’s all of theirs.

~~

Maggie’s off to the gate with Deanna, because they’ve been surveying the community all morning, looking for opportunities for improvement.

But when they get there, it’s wide open. Maggie's heart sinks, and she feels like she's been punched in the face. But now is not the time to worry, it's the time to fight.

This doesn’t look like a mistake, like before.

This is purposeful, vengeful—the gate has a large rock next to it, propping it open, and stopping it from gliding at least partway closed.

“Spread the word as fast as you can,” Maggie yells, and Deanna rushes off while Maggie moves the rock and shuts the gate, closing it quickly and carefully. She pauses briefly, noticing blood near the fence.

She looks around at the homes, at the _life_ she’s come to care about, and prays for as little death as possible.

She knows, even now, that people are going to die.

The only question is, how many?

~~

There are too many walkers, and they’re killing people left and right.

They need to hide, or run, but there’s little opportunity for either anyway.

There’s no reason for them to be on fire, but it looks like half the houses are going up in flames.

Maggie searches for Glenn and Tara, hoping that she’ll find them in time.

She runs around a corner right into a crowd of walkers, and there Glenn and Tara are.

When a walker bites into Tara’s neck, dragging her down to the ground, Maggie screams out in agony, and nearly falls to the ground from the force of her grief.

Glenn attacks the walker that has just killed Tara, and Maggie runs forward to try to help him fight his way out, but it’s too late.

And then she feels pain, and then hits the ground hard. Everything goes dark, and it’s all over.

Thus ends day one.

~~

Maggie wakes up in bed, squished between Tara and Glenn, which means that Tara probably got up late the night before to use the restroom.

Wait—her brain is fuzzy, and then the day before flickers though her mind, and she starts shaking her lovers vigorously.

“I had a dream,” she tells them. “I think something really bad is going to happen today.”

“It was just a dream,” Tara moans, turning back over.

“Go back to sleep,” Glenn says, and Maggie forces herself to calm down.

“Wake up,” Maggie says firmly, and Glenn opens his eyes to look at her. He frowns when he sees her face.

“Are you okay?” The concern in his voice gets Tara’s attention, and she rolls back over, eyes flickering open.

“What’s wrong?” Tara asks.

Maggie opens her mouth, ready to explain what happened, but then she realizes how ridiculous it sounds.

It was just a dream.

“Just a bad dream,” Maggie answers, and Tara reaches out to grab her hand, squeezing it gently before rolling out of bed to start her day.

It was all just a bad dream.

~~

They go through their morning routine, and while certain things are familiar, much like her dream, she reminds herself that they have a routine now, and that’s natural.

Finally, she heads off to see Deanna, and they start their survey of the grounds, but she’d known this was coming, so it’s entirely possible that she had a very realistic dream the night before.

She keeps telling herself this, because she's not sure how else to process everything.

When they come across the open gate, her heart drops and pure panic overcomes her.

They need to do something differently, and so Maggie sends Deanna in a different direction, quickly locks up the gate, and sprints to find her people.

This time, at least, she knows where they are.

~~

She finds Tara and Glenn quickly.

“Remember when I said I had a bad dream?” Maggie asks, pulling them away from eating their lunches. “It’s a bad reality.”

“What’s going on?” Glenn asks.

“Someone left the gate open,” Maggie says, and they get moving. “On purpose. I don’t know why, but I think—“ Walkers exist, so why is so hard to accept that she’s reliving a day?

Walkers are a scientific disaster, Maggie reminds herself.

This though—she’d had a warning, and she’d screwed it up. If she gets another chance, she’s going to do better, she promises herself.

Maybe this is God, giving her a chance to save the people she loves.

~~

They die, again, and Maggie wakes up in her bed, surrounded by the two people left in this world she loves the most.

She shakes them awake, because she’s not taking any chances.

“Get up,” she demands. “Gear up, and get ready. There’s a war today. Walkers inside the walls.”

“What?” Tara asks, already grabbing clothes and throwing them on, and grabbing for her weapons. “How?”

“I don’t know,” Maggie says, reaching out her hands and cupping Tara’s face on both sides, then leaning in to kiss her hard, like this could be the last time.

It could be, she knows, and she’s not leaving anything to chance.

She turns to kiss Glenn next. “If there’s no hope, get to the vehicles with as many people as possible. If we get overwhelmed, we can’t fight our way out.”

Glenn looks confused, but he just nods, trusting her.

~~

Maggie runs to the gate while Glenn and Tara go to spread the word, and they’re all split up, but Maggie’s feeling slightly more optimistic.

She’s hours earlier than before.

This has to be good enough.

She holds back a scream and kicks the open fence before pulling it closed and locking it tight.

She looks around for the person who is supposed to be on guard duty, and finds him dead.

He’s not bitten, just shot right through the head.

“Someone’s doing this.”

Maggie looks around, searching for the answers she knows she won’t find.

~~

On the third day, she dies alone.

Or, well, she dies without friends or family, or anyone she recognizes near her.

She catches glimpses of enemies—of humans using walkers to destroy them—and hopes to live her day again.

~~

On days four and five, she searches for information, trying to head off the death and destruction she knows is to come.

They find a way to save the community from surprise death by walkers, but that doesn’t change the fact that by the time Maggie wakes up, there are still too many within their walls. They didn't just wander in, she knows. They must have been led, or dropped off inside their walls.

She’s grateful for Tara and Glenn, who never doubt her, and simply do as she asks.

~~

On day six, the plan is simply to flee.

Maggie waits on a bus with a group of people she knows as family and friends, but when they drive outside of their walls, they come under fire from people.

People are as deadly as walkers, especially when they’ve made it their mission to kill.

People are turning all around her from stray bullets, and she screams out in frustration—lashing out to try to get out of the bus in time.

She fails, and dies.

~~

On day seven, she almost gives up.

She’s trapped in a repeating day where everyone she cares about dies. She's lived through horrific days before, but she's never been forced to repeat it, unable to affect any real change. 

On her way to warn her friends, like she has every other day, she stops for a moment to vomit in the flowers.

She’s literally sick to her stomach.

~~

She’s trapped with Sasha in a vehicle, and there’s no way they’re getting out.

Today, she's survived longer than usual. She's not sure how much more fight she has inside of her. 

Maggie reaches out her hand and grabs Sasha’s hand, squeezing it hard, trying to get some strength from it.

“Please don’t die,” Maggie says, her voice catching on the last word. She’s trying not to cry, and barely holding back tears.

“Can’t make any promises,” Sasha says, laughing slightly as if to quell the terror in her heart.

Maggie checks her watch, and looks up at the sky.

She’s spent the entire day running, hiding and fighting, hoping that if she can just get through the day, things might be different.

She’s not sure what this hope is—maybe if they all just hide until midnight, everything will disappear.

Maggie lets go of Sasha’s hand and rubs her head.

“It’s almost midnight.”

“Yes, it is,” Sasha sighs. “You know, they scare me every hour of every day, but they’re worse at night.”

“Yeah,” Maggie agrees. “They are.”

Tick tock, tick tock.

It’s midnight.

~~

She wakes up back in her bed, and concludes that her job is to save everyone, and she just needs to find a way to do that.

For some reason, the universe has gifted her with this opportunity.

They can all live.

She’s chosen to believe this, because the alternative is unacceptable.

~~

On day nine, Maggie has to remind herself that this is a gift.

She keeps seeing people die. If it's not the walkers, then it's the humans who seem determined to destroy this safe haven.

It's getting harder and harder to get up every day and keep fighting. 

This is a not a nightmare, this is an opportunity.

This is a good thing.

(This day feels like it’s never going to end, and she wishes it would.)

~~

On day ten, she’s holding baby Judith when she dies, and she thinks that might be her least favorite of her deaths.

She knows what it’s like to die now, something that she wishes she couldn’t say.

There’s that moment of tension, that pain, and the feeling that something dark and deep is opening up inside of you, threatening to swallow you whole.

She wonders, sometimes, what her life would be like without the walkers.

These people would not be hers, but maybe they’d all have found happiness.

In this world, which barely resembles the old one, Maggie’s not sure what happiness even feels like most of the time.

Before today, she’d been safe. She’d nearly forgotten what that had felt like. Alexandria had been a gift to them all, and she'd released so much of the pain and suffering she'd been carrying along with her. 

Between falling in love with Tara, and building a new family with everyone in Alexandria, she’d started to feel hope again.

And maybe hope is the closest she can get to happiness. Maybe love and safety are the height of the human experience now.

It doesn’t matter anyway, because it can all be ripped out of your hands in moments.

And that’s what today is—an exercise in futility, in failure and loss.

This is all some sort of cosmic reminder that hope invites disappointment.

~~

These people attacking them look familiar.

Maybe they’re the ones who have been stalking them from time to time, leaving warnings and attacking their people when they go on supply runs.

Maggie doesn’t know what their problem is, but in this world you don’t really need one to decide that everyone else needs to die.

~~

If she has to die, then she wants to die with the people she loves.

It’s not the most practical approach, but she doesn’t want to spend another day without them.

They try a more aggressive approach today, and take the fighting to the people outside, attacking with abandon.

The walkers inside the walls become a problem though, and they’re sandwiched between two groups of deadly killers.

She dies between the two people she loves most, and that, at least, is a blessing.

She’d rather not die at all next time.

She needs a better plan.

Thus ends day fourteen.

~~

Day seventeen: Maggie succeeds.

Truthfully, they all do.

They come up with a plan to attack the people outside, and for once instead of their people dying, someone else’s do.

They organize a search party to kill all of the walkers who got in through the gate, and while they don’t clear the entire space, they get far enough that when nighttime comes, they can simply all huddle up and feel relatively safe.

They’ll clean up tomorrow, if it ever comes. Maggie doesn't mention that while they're making their plans, but there's no need to bother when they've finally saved the day. Maybe this is enough.

Maggie leans against Glenn, and Tara reaches out her hand to grasp Maggie’s.

“How did you know?” Tara asks.

Maggie’s too busy stalking her watch.

Maggie doesn’t answer.

It hits midnight.

Nothing happens.

“I have no idea,” Maggie answers honestly.

Maggie sighs, and curls up comfortably, stealing a bit more blanket than is probably fair. 

Today, she thinks gratefully, is not yesterday.

Today, they're as safe as any other day, and there's no guarantee of attack.

There's no guarantee there won't be one either.

Today is uncertain. 


End file.
